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The Workshop 88 Shapeoko 2 is coming along nicely. It recently cut this 18″ foam sign, taking advantage of the SO2’s “frontless” design that allows working on arbitrarily long pieces, even though its active work area is only about 10″x10″. Some details are here.

The Z axis auto touch-off switch, inspired by the Carvey “Smart Clamp” is now working as well. There’s a little clip of it here.

While it’s machined handles for some of its clamp bolt and even machined the scales for a knife handle replacement, its most ambitious project to date is full 3D machining of the body of a pinewood derby car. That’s still work in progress. Stay tuned!

It’s been a bit quiet around on the blog this summer, but that’s mostly because we’ve been pretty busy. I thought I’d put up an update on what’s been going on around the space.

Thursdays!

We’re always out at the space on Thursday nights for our public meeting, so drop on by! We had a lot of fun last week playing with some Tormach stepper drivers that Tom M. brought in, but every week brings something new and exciting.

Libraries!

We’ve been doing a lot with libraries all over the burbs. You might remember this thing that we built for Glen Ellyn Public Library back in May. In addition to that, we also do a lot of classes and DIY fairs.

This summer, we ran events at Bloomingdale, Glen Ellyn, Indian Trails, Winfield, Lisle, Addison, and at Lake Park High School. We’ve got even more events coming up in the next few months, at the libraries I mentioned before as well as Roselle and St. Charles.

Improving the space!

We’re currently updating the back room, with the front room next on the list. There’s been a lot of great discussion about what to do with the front room, and we’ve got a team working on getting it all done.

Paul R. did a bunch of work to rehab Prof. Braino’s Enco mill, and it is now up and running. We’re going to be offering a class to members this summer to get them up to speed on how to use the mill.

Classes!

We’ve been a bit lax in getting classes scheduled, and we’re trying to address that. We have a bunch of classes scheduled this summer, so check back for scheduling details once they’re announced. Next up on the list are Electronics 101 and Basic Networking, both this July.

At Workshop 88 we believe that makerspaces and hackerspaces grow smartly by working with other like-minded people in our area. Please consider supporting SpaceLab and sharing their campaign with anyone you know! They are about 2/3 of the way to their goal as of this post. Help them get all the way there!

When a patron turns in a book they’ve read for the summer reading program, they get a token to drop into the box. Since the Willowbrook Wildlife Center rehabilitates native animals that have been injured, I thought that playing local native animal sounds would help create a connection between the program and the organization it is supporting.

Here’s what the box looks like inside.

The speakers are driven by an Adafruit Music Maker Shield run off of an Arduino Uno, using the Adafruit VS1053 library. The token detection mechanism uses a high-intensity LED and a voltage divider, consisting of an 180 ohm resistor and a CdS photocell, to create an optical detector. The voltage across the small resistor is checked with an analogRead() in a tight loop to detect a token falling through the slot. Volume control is done through software on the VS1053, so I just hooked the sweeper on a 10K linear potentiometer up to a second analog input. When a token is detected, I play a random sound from the SD card in the background while continuing to check the volume control.

Here’s the schematic and a breadboard layout. I’ve just shown the control circuitry, as the Music Maker shield should be pretty easy to hook up.

All of the code, these schematics, and a Fritzing file are available on Github. Pay particular attention to the pin assignments at the top of the sketch if you’re using the Adafruit Music Maker board. They are hard-wired on the shield, but Adafruit’s tutorial is based on their breakout board, which you have to wire to an Arduino yourself.

One thing I had to consider with this build was power. I initially powered the box off of 4 AA batteries, and it looked like it worked great. After a few days of testing, it started to act a bit flaky. After being on for about 10 minutes, the speakers would just play static. After some testing, I found that the supply voltage was too low, so I swapped in a USB power supply for the batteries, and it worked much better. Since this has to run all day long for a couple months, USB is a better solution anyway.

We’re teaching a couple audio classes this summer, make sure to check back for scheduling details if you’re interested in doing something like this project yourself!

Spring is in the air, flowers are emerging, and Glen Ellyn is slowly climbing out of what has been an incredibly trying winter.

The new season has inspired us to take a new look at Workshop 88 and revamp our main room. While it’s a homey basement that holds many fond memories, members have been encouraging me to come up with some new ways to change the space around to be welcoming to new members. I wanted to post some photos of the current layout so that we can work on rearranging some things.

Workshop 88 members spend so much time working on their projects and discussing new ideas that they don’t pay much attention to the space around them; but space is important. Space communicates what we value, inspires our creativity, and develops our sense of belonging. Therefore, it is really important that we spend time recreating Workshop some in order to make our space more inviting.

What do you think we should do to revamp Workshop 88? Maybe some color? Reorganizing the layout? Please comment with your ideas!

Link

THOTCON is the annual, small venue, hacking conference based in Chicago IL, USA. THOTCON is a non-profit, non-commercial event looking to provide the best conference possible on a very limited budget.

For the past 2 years Workshop 88 has been honored to design and produce the electronic attendee badges for the conference as a service to the local community. The badge crew this year consisted of: Paul Reich, Bill Paulson, Karl Knutson, Zach Cassity, Russell Lankenau, and Rudy Ristich

This year’s badge was inspired by portable gaming systems from the past and featured 102 x 64 pixel graphic LCD screen and a push button interface. Once again, the badge features an Atmel AVR based microcontroller. The badge used nearly every byte of the 32k available SRAM on its Atmega32u4 chip. The software consisted of a Break-out style game which participants could play to passtime, a complete schedule of talks and labs for the day long conference, and the ability to patch into arcade panels hosted in the Hacker Village, and a few surprises for discovering inside.

Just like the THOTCON 0x4 Badge, the 0x5 Badge is compatible with the Arduino open hardware programming environment and can accept standard Arduino shields. This means the badge can be easily reused and repurposed to power any sort of project. An improvement from last year’s badge is that no additional parts need to be added; conference goers can simply plug the badge into their laptop once burning a bootloader to reprogram it, encouraging easier exploration and badge hacking.

The badge is designed to be completely open hardware and software. Workshop 88 would like to thank the open source hardware and software community especially: Arduino, Oliver Kraus and other contributors to the U8glib graphics library, Dean Camera for the LUFA Project, and last, but far from least: Twisted Traces, our local assembly partner in Elk Grove, IL.

Workshop 88 will be holding a badge hacking contest throughout the month of May. Judging will consist of a panel from Workshop 88 and the THOTCON crew. Interested contestants can register on the badge website: http://badge.workshop88.com

Full details on the badge specifications and firmware will be released on May 1st in conjunction with the opening of the badge hacking contest.

We’ve been getting more and more requests for 3D printer demos lately. Inspired by not wanting to disappoint kids who didn’t even have their first iPad back in the days when it was magic to be able to 3D print anything – like when our Makerbot Cupcake was hot stuff – Jim has been trying to get the old printer working again. This W88 logo is one of the latest results. Not bad for an old 1-color printer! (Thanks to Bill for the color change tips.)

Its output is no match for current “appliance” 3D printers, but it’s still fine to show the basics in a nice noisy demo. Details of Jim’s adventures with the printer are captured here.

The University of Illinois has developed a new device called IOLab which allows students to explore physical principles and concepts in one all-in-one unit which can easily fit in a pocket. Andrew, a physics professor at Joliet Junior College, has high hopes for the device in the classroom and beyond. IOLab features a variety of sensors, many of which can be found in a physics lab, in a portable and affordable form. Built-in wheels record the displacement of the unit, measuring acceleration and velocity. It also features a force sensor, a barometer to measure air pressure, as well as a light, magnetic, temperature, and sound sensor.

Andrew is excited about IOLab because he hopes that the device will work in a way that engages our particular population of students today. It’s a great kinesthetic learning tool, encouraging creative exploration of physics in a non-threatening way. He mentioned that an additional benefit is that it has expansion capabilities to discover other yet to be determined inputs and outputs. Due to the utility flexibility of the device, it can be used in a variety of settings and serve a plethora of purposes. Andrew has a lot of imaginative ideas of how to use the device in his classes; one thought he has is to take some data, give it to the students and tell them to recreate the graph and figure out the experiment.

Bart’s Delta Router – Not going to be there on Saturday, but look at how awesome it is!

Bart Dring of MakerSlide fame is going to be out at Workshop 88 on Saturday, March 1 demonstrating CNC concepts and giving a brief talk about how he has constructed several CNC builds. This talk immediately follows Arduino 301: Controlling The World, so come out for both! He has designed and built many great tools, such as a laser cutter, several types of 3D printers, including delta style printers. One of his most recent creations is a delta-style CNC router. Very cool! We look forward to having Bart out at Workshop 88 to share his expertise.

This event is FREE and OPEN to everyone! Please come out and bring a friend.